Back in North Carolina

I am back in Raleigh North Carolina. After almost 4 weeks, I am back to complete the job I had started when I last visited. Not much has changed, although the mall has taken on a dramatic change and looks ready for life.

Want to hear something strange?

Yesterday morning, at about 7am, my co-worker Derek called me from LAX (Los Angeles International Airport). He told me that he just heard my last name called over the loud speaker. He asked someone at the counter there, and confirmed it was my name. We laughed and thought nothing of it.

It was almost 10am, I’d been at work for 3 1/2 hours, it was just another day. I knew I was scheduled to leave for North Carolina the following morning (this morning).

Carli, our secretary, came in my office and asked what I was doing here. I replied, “Working.”

She said, “No, you should be flying.”

Here’s what happened. Right from the beginning I was scheduled to travel to North Carolina from Wednesday through Friday. However, at some point, mis-communication occurred between Carli and my boss. She bought tickets for Tuesday.

Since I had obviously missed my flight, my company called the airline to see what we could do. Basically nothing, perhaps buy a new ticket and save the current ticket to use as credit for a future ticket. However, it turned out that my ticket was a non-refundable type ticket, something that can only be applied to flights booked 7 days in advance or more. The new ticket was a refundable type ticket, something you couldn’t apply a non-refundable type ticket credit towards.

The company sends me down anyway to see if we can get around this. Of course I couldn’t. Now it was worse. I was sent down after the last flight of the day for that airline, and pretty much hopeless. I had to buy a ticket for $1501.00.

That was an $800+ blunder. Oops!